Connecticut's Hidden History

History as news is never a contradiction if that history reveals something important, even startling.

"Beyond Complicity" is a startling story about a disturbing chapter in Connecticut history that skidded from the state's general consciousness centuries ago.

The transatlantic slave trade may have been the most prolonged, violent event in human history. Over three centuries, the major European powers drove an international economic system in which human beings were used as currency.

The numbers are almost beyond imagining. Nearly 12 million Africans were kidnapped, many by their own people, transported across the Atlantic Ocean, and worked, often to death, in the fast-developing New World.

The slave trade is hardly news. Its major players were France, the Netherlands and, most of all, Great Britain, whose ships carried nearly 3 million enslaved Africans before the legal trade ended in 1808.

In the American colonies, during most of the time that the slave trade was legal, tiny Rhode Island was our Great Britain.

There were about 1,100 documented voyages of slave ships from New England, and Rhode Island men were at the helm of more than 900 of them. Narragansett Bay is one of the world's largest and deepest harbors. Ocean-going vessels that could hold thousands of bales of cotton or hundreds of human beings had no trouble sailing in or out of Newport or Bristol, R.I.

Then there was Connecticut. We're not even on the Atlantic (the closest we come is Long Island Sound). But we do have very navigable rivers, such as the Connecticut and, of course, New London's Thames.

Two and a half centuries ago, before the American Revolution, many of Connecticut's cities were thriving commercial centers. River ports such as New London and Middletown were producing fortunes in both shipbuilding and trade. Many names that resonate today have their roots in those fortunes, good Yankee names like Alsop and Russell in Middletown, and Shaw and Avery in New London.

Connecticut's wealth exploded in the Triangle Trade, as smart merchants and other businessmen supplied the slave plantations in the West Indies that grew and processed sugar cane.

Connecticut's role in shipping food and livestock to these islands is no secret. But for many years, little connection had been made between that role and slavery. Most people, in fact, have assumed, if they thought of it at all, that the major role of Connecticut citizens in American slavery was one of liberation. But while this was certainly true - Connecticut played a large role in the abolition effort, and in the Civil War, Connecticut men fought beside other northerners - the total picture turned out to be more complicated, and far more damning.

In September 2002, Northeast produced our first special issue on Connecticut's involvement in slavery. We called it "Complicity: How Connecticut Chained Itself to Slavery." We explored the ways that our small New England state had profited as fully from slavery as any in the South, though our involvement was largely from a distance.

Far from being an exercise in political correctness, our research had been driven by news events:

Aetna had recently apologized for insuring slaves during the 19th century. In addition, a growing number of African Americans were calling for financial reparations for centuries of slavery, like those awarded to Holocaust survivors and their families, or to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II.

In "Complicity," we wrote of large farms - one could call them plantations - in southeastern Connecticut that had been worked by slaves.

We wrote of how eastern Connecticut's textile mills had depended on the millions of pounds of slave-grown cotton they imported from the Southern states.

We listed the names of slave owners in every county in Connecticut, and reported that at one point more than 5,000 black people were enslaved here.

We even wrote about how The Connecticut Courant, this newspaper's predecessor, profited by publishing runaway slave ads.

Frankly, we were shocked by what we'd learned, but the response from readers was even more surprising. The Courant was besieged by calls from throughout the state and across the country, from colleges and libraries, community groups, government agencies and just regular folks seeking copies of "Complicity." The state Department of Education ordered 25,000 copies and sent them to every middle school, high school and community college in Connecticut.

A literary agent in New York called, and within weeks we were offered a contract with Ballantine/Random House. Editors there, however, were eager for a broader perspective: Could we determine whether the entire North was somehow complicit in slavery?

Our book attempts to answer this question. "Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery in America" is scheduled for release in September.

These are the roots of today's special report which, as the name "Beyond Complicity" reflects, shows that Connecticut's involvement in slavery goes even deeper.

Researched and written by Anne Farrow, one of the lead writers on the first special issue and on the book, this report places Connecticut on the front lines of the slave trade.

"Beyond Complicity" is the story of Connecticut and Africa, of New London and a little-known island off the West African coast with a brutal and tragic history.

It's also a narrative about the past and the present, which, in any culture, as Farrow writes in Chapter 3, "swirl around each other, touching and, in some sense, changing the other."

In "Beyond Complicity," we try to illuminate this largely untold chapter of Connecticut's past, and make it a story we can talk about.

If past and present can, in some sense, change each other, this state history couldn't be more painfully relevant today.